A low moan tore from him as his mouth crushed down on hers. He kissed her fiercely, hungrily, slanting his mouth savagely back and forth against hers. She whimpered, bringing her hands up to drag his head down to hers as she strained against him. It was as if she couldn't get close enough to him, couldn't get enough of him. He thrust his tongue inside her mouth, and her own met it, mated with it, danced a timeless cotillion of seduction and surrender.
Fire burned within her, consumed her, drove her. His
hands were all over, coursing roughly down her back, her waist, her hips and buttocks, as if he would touch every inch of her, leave his imprint everywhere. And everywhere he touched, she burned.
He shoved her back against the table, pinning her there with his hips. He splayed his fingers through her hair, tilting her chin up with his thumbs as his mouth left hers to scorch a path down her throat to the hollow where her pulse beat so wildly. His hands closed over her breasts, kneading them roughly through the cheap cloth of her dress. Then his fingers were at the neckline of her dress, fumbling with the laces until he cursed with impatience and tore at them.
His hands closed over her breasts again, his fingers scorching her flesh through the fine linen of the chemise he'd given her. She felt him smile against the hollow of her throat.
"Why you little cheat," he said with a low, wicked laugh that clutched hotly at her belly. "You were too bloody proud to wear the dress I bought you, but you've been wearing this." She gasped as his thumbs swept back and forth across the points where her turgid nipples pressed up against the chemise.
"I couldn't... resist. Sometimes when it's warm and I feel the cloth against my skin, I pretend it's your hands touching me."
He loosened the ribbon at the neck and pushed the chemise down so that he could put his hands on her bare breasts. "Like this?"
"Yes." She groaned. "Like this."
His mouth closed over hers again, hungry and demanding. The edge of the table bit into her buttocks as he pressed her back harder, grinding his pelvis against her. His hands left her breasts to fumble with her skirt.
"Tell me you want this." His breath beat harshly against her ear as he pulled up her dress and petticoat. "Tell me you want it."
"I want it," she whispered obediently as his hands slid
around her bare thighs, shoving her legs apart. "I want you."
"That's good," he said as he pushed her petticoat up farther and ran his silken fingers up the insides of her thighs. "Because you're going to get me." She gasped as he found the center of her need, his suddenly gentle touch sending spasms of desire rippling through her body.
He loomed over her and gazed down at her with dark, tempestuous blue eyes. He slipped one finger inside her, and she thought he shuddered.
"Christ, Bryony..." He slipped a second finger inside her as his other hand fumbled with the flap of his breeches. "I've never wanted a woman the way I want you. Never."
She reached between them, her fingers closing over his erection as he freed it. He let out a rasping cry that sounded as if it had been torn from him against his will. His hands spanned her hips, settling her on top of the table. She wrapped her arms around his waist, pulling him close between her legs as he slipped his hands beneath her naked buttocks and positioned her for his entry. She felt him, velvety smooth and hard and hot, pressing against her. Then he was inside her, stretching her, filling her with his hardness, his maleness, and she was the one who cried out.
He pulled almost out of her, then drove in again, harder, deeper, again and again. His mouth captured hers, and he kissed her ruthlessly as he pounded into her. His lips traveled lower, to her throat, to her breasts, and he was pressing her back until she lay fiat on the table before him, her chemise pushed down below her bare breasts, her petticoat rucked up to her waist. His hands, his eyes, his mouth were all over her. She threaded her fingers through his dark hair, holding his head down to her, arching her back to rise up and meet him. Her blood pounded through her body, her senses soared.
She was awash in pleasure, adrift in a world of sensations. She wrapped her legs around him, drawing him
deeper inside her as each grinding thrust sent wave after wave of aching pleasure through her. She was thrashing beneath him now, writhing with her need, screaming with her need, until the waves finally peaked and rolled over into a gasping, shuddering fulfillment that swept over them both.
He raised up on his arms and looked down at her. In the half-light his expression was shadowed, hidden. Slowly he lifted a finger to trace a line from her chin down her neck, between her naked breasts, to the point where her clothes bunched about her waist.
"You're one hell of a woman, Bryony," he whispered.
She hugged him to her again, burying her face in his warm shoulder, feeling suddenly, desperately afraid.
God help her, she had given herself to this man: body, heart, and soul. But what did she have of him? A moment's passing passion? And then what?
His head lowered to her breast. He cupped its fullness with one lean, strong hand as his tongue traced a slow circle around her large areola before he sucked her nipple between his lips.
She jerked in surprise and delight, and he laughed softly against her naked flesh. "I've been wanting to do that for months. I've even found myself envying Simon for his ready access to what I've wanted so badly."
He lifted his head so he could watch his hands caressing her breasts, and she felt the heat begin to glow within her again. She moved slightly, arching against him, and he looked up at her face, his eyes heavy-lidded with his own desire.
"I want you again, Bryony," he said, his voice low and husky. Then a slow smile curved up the edges of his lips as he added, "And again and again and again..."
She laughed. And for the moment, she was happy.
She was Hayden St. John's convict mistress.
When she allowed her thoughts to dwell on the reality of what she'd become, Bryony knew a deep and abiding sense of shame. But at night, when his hot, hungry mouth closed over hers and his lean, hard body covered her, she knew only divine pleasure and an aching kind of happiness.
He was a tender, exquisitely skilled lover who pleasured her body in ways she'd never dreamed of. Her couplings with Oliver had always taken place in bed, in the dark, with her night rail quickly rucked up out of the way. Whatever he might have done with his whores, Oliver had had very traditional ideas about what he could do with his wife.
But she wasn't Hayden's wife; she was his mistress. They made love on the floor, against the wall, in the chairs—even, on one hot, memorable night, in a pool of the creek beneath a myriad of twinkling stars.
Now that she was his mistress, he bought her things; dresses and shoes and chemises and fine batiste night rails. But she told him laughingly the night rails were a waste of money because he was always taking them off her—either ripping them away in his haste, or easing them off with deliberate, sensuous slowness. He liked to sleep with one arm thrown possessively over her naked body, and he liked to wake up in the morning and find her beside him. So eventually Bryony made some space
in one of his chests and moved her belongings out of Laura's room.
It was when she was going through the drawers, looking for anything she might have missed, that she found herself staring, once more, at Laura's sketchbooks. It had been some time now since she'd looked at them. She picked out the last one and flipped through it until she came to Laura's self-portrait.
Easing back into a sitting position, she laid the notebook open on her knees and gazed upon the dead wife of the man she was now sleeping with. God, but Laura had been a beautiful woman. So fair and delicate. It made Bryony ache just to look at her. Made her feel awkward, coarse, in comparison.
What a foolish thought,
she chided herself bitterly. How could she compare herself with a woman like Laura St. John? Laura had been a viscount's daughter, Hayden's lady wife.
She was his mistress, a convicted killer.
She was sliding the notebook back into the drawer when she heard hasty footsteps slamming across the stone flagging of the veranda.
Ann McBride's pale, freckled face appeared around the door. Ann now slept in the lean-to beside the kitchen and helped Bryony with the cleaning and washing. But Quincy had been right when he'd said the girl hadn't a notion of how to do the simplest things.
"Lord amercy," panted Ann. "I'm that sorry, Bryony."
Bryony stood up, eyeing the redhead with an increasingly familiar sense of impending doom. Ann claimed to have been in service in Glasgow before she was convicted—wrongly, she insisted—of trying to pawn one of her mistress's sets of embroidered pillowcases. Maybe it was true; Bryony was beginning to suspect that Ann's long-suffering former mistress had succumbed to the temptation of having the girl transported, just to be rid of her. "What happened, Ann?" she asked now.
"I done left the door to the dairy open when I went to
fetch some butter this morning, and those dratted chickens of yers are in there, peckin' at all yer lovely cheeses!"
Hayden rode into the yard just as Bryony descended upon the dairy, her broom swinging. When she wanted to, she could swear as fluently as any convict ever transported to Botany Bay, and she was swearing now, in that husky, almost hoarse voice of hers. He reined in, a slow smile curling his lips as he watched her send her squeaking, squawking chickens flying every which way.
Everyone called them Bryony's chickens, because she was the one who fed them and gathered their eggs. But he knew she hated them, and he wasn't surprised to see her laying about her with the broom with an almost savage delight, taking revenge for every malicious peck, every rotten egg of the past months.
One of the hens, a particularly nasty but prolific layer Bryony had named Eunice for reasons she'd never explained to him, was made of sterner stuff than her sisters. Instead of squawking about with feathers flying, Eunice turned in the doorway of the dairy and contemptuously stuck out her head. Her long, skinny neck arched, her beady eyes stared unblinkingly at Bryony. Then Eunice flew right at her.
Bryony seized the attacking hen with both hands and wrung her scrawny neck.
"Ha! Take that, you vainglorious little biddy," she cried in triumph, stomping up the steps from the dairy with the dead chicken dangling from her hand.
Ann gasped. "Bryony! Ye done killed yer best layer!"
Hayden laughed.
Bryony's head snapped around. The late summer sun glinted off the flaming highlights in the hair that curled about her face in typical wild abandon. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling with triumph, and she was breathing heavily enough that her breasts rose and fell noticeably. He stared at her, the smile dying on his lips,
and he wondered anew at the way the sight of her, even in her old work dress and with a dead chicken in her hand, could make him ache to sweep her up in his arms and carry her off to their bed.
At the sound of his laugh, her eyes flashed, and she descended upon him, the disreputable hen still clutched in one angry fist. "These bloody chickens! They've been in my dairy and pecked all my cheeses."
He swung slowly out of the saddle. She stopped before him and shook the dead chicken under his nose. "I need a henhouse! I am sick and tired of searching all over this bloody yard for eggs, and having the bloody hens under my feet in the kitchen every bloody time I turn around. And last week some bloody dingo came into the yard during the night and stole that white hen I raised from a chick myself. If he'd taken Eunice here"—she gave the hated hen another shake "—he'd have been welcome to her. But I need a henhouse!"
"Why did you call her Eunice?"
"What?" She slowly lowered the hen and stood stock-still.
"The hen. Who did you name her after, Bryony? Who is Eunice?"
As he watched, all the fight and fury seemed to drain out of her to be replaced by a sad, aching want. "My aunt. Eunice is my aunt... my Uncle Edward's wife. She's the one who... who has Madeline."
She would have turned away, but he reached out and laid his hand gently on her shoulder. "I'll have the men start on a henhouse right away," he said.
He wanted to say he'd give her anything she wanted, if only it would make her happy.
But he didn't.
Hayden sat in a chair in the garden, reading the
Sydney Gazette
and smoking a cheroot while Bryony worked among her herbs. His pose was relaxed, but in reality he
wasn't relaxed at all, for he had to keep getting up to rescue Simon, who seemed bent on either falling off the veranda or eating whatever bugs he happened to come upon in the course of his exploration of the garden.
"I'm beginning to wish he'd never learned to crawl," Hayden said as he reached down to remove a slater from his fascinated son's clutches.
Bryony laughed. She laughed more often these days, he'd noticed. And not just in bed, when his hands were on her body and he made her sigh with pleasure. Sometimes he could almost believe she was happy... until he'd catch that sad, faraway look in her eyes, and he'd know she was thinking about Madeline.
"Just make sure he doesn't eat those, will you?" She smiled fondly at the little boy, who now sat in the middle of the gravel pathway, piling pebbles into the old tin cup she'd given him to play with.
Hayden grunted. He'd been trying to read the published names of those people with letters awaiting collection in Sydney, and he'd had to start the column over again three times. Suddenly a name leapt out at him from the print. He laid the paper aside and glanced over at her.
"Bryony."
"Yes?" She was on her knees, busy pulling weeds. "Your name is listed here; there's a letter for you in Sydney."
She stopped pulling weeds, but she didn't look up. He
watched the blood drain from her face and knew what she was thinking. It was only February. It was unlikely the letter she'd sent by the
Lady Laura
had even reached England yet, so there was no way this letter could have been written in response to it. Yet from the few things she'd said about him, Hayden doubted that Sir Edward Peyton would have written to his disgraced niece without a reason.
Hayden stood up and went to kneel behind her so he could wrap his arms about her waist and pull her back
against his body, comforting her with his warmth. "Don't assume it's bad news, Bryony." He pressed his lips to her sun-streaked hair.
But there was nothing he could say or do to stop her trembling.
It was five days before Gideon made it back from Sydney Town. He rode by horseback to Green Hills and took a sloop from there. But he had other business to transact for Hayden, and so Bryony waited, day after anxious day.
She was in Simon's room, putting away clean clothes, when she looked up and saw Gideon ride into the yard. She stood before the open French doors and watched Hayden stroll out of the stables. Watched the two men stand, talking, in the shadows of the barn. Watched a small white packet change hands. Watched Hayden walk slowly across the sun-flooded yard.
Watching, watching, watching. It seemed as if she were standing outside of herself, watching her own life being played out before her.
She was in the hall to meet him when he walked through the door. She held out her hand for the letter and took it without a word, carrying it into the parlor. She couldn't sit down. She stood in the middle of the floor and broke the seal with trembling hands as she wondered if this letter were about to break what was left of her heart.
Her gaze raced down the page. Sir Edward Peyton's letter was brief and cruelly impersonal.
Dear Mrs. Wentworth,
Your letter postmarked Cape Town received this morning. I have instructed the servants that any future communications arriving from persons styling themselves Bryony Wentworth are to be destroyed unopened, as I no longer have a niece by that name. Madeline, of course, has been informed of her mother's
recent death, and I am convinced you will understand that any further attempts on your part to contact her would only be detrimental to all concerned.
Bryony felt as if all the blood had drained from her body, leaving her cold and dead. She read the letter through three times, as if she couldn't quite bring herself to believe what it said. Then she slowly and methodically crumpled the single, salt-stained sheet in both her hands.
"Bryony?"
She looked up, but though her lips parted and her throat worked, she was beyond speech.
Hayden lifted the crumpled paper from her unresisting fingers and carefully flattened it out while she went to stand by the window and stare unseeingly out at the sun glinting off the river below. This time it was Hayden who crushed Sir Edward's letter in his fist, and hurled it with a violent oath into the empty fireplace.
"Madeline's not dead," said Bryony in a queer voice. "I am."
She turned away from the window and faced him, her hands gripping her elbows tight against her.
"Bloody hell, Bryony." He came to her and put his arms around her and pulled her close, but she continued to hold herself rigid, her fingers clutching her elbows as if she'd fall apart if she let go.
He held her away from him, his hands on her shoulders, and gave her a small shake. "You're not dead, Bryony, just because that bastard says you're dead to him."
"I feel as if I were dead."
"We all feel dead inside sometimes. And God knows you've got more reasons than most. But you're not dead." He cradled her face in the palm of his hand and slid his thumb along her lower lip. "You're the most vibrantly alive woman I've ever known."
Her lip trembled beneath his touch, and when he drew her to him again, this time she didn't resist.
"Bryony,"
he
breathed softly, his lips against her hair. "Oh, Christ, I know I can't make it any better, but I wish...
I
wish
I
could."
Her head tipped back and she stared up into his concerned, beloved face. "You can hold me," she whispered, reaching up to draw his head down to hers. "And make love to me," she said, her lips almost touching his. "Oh, please, Hayden... make love to me. Now."
He swept her up into his arms and carried her away to their bedroom.
Afterward, they lay together in the heat of the afternoon, the curtains drawn against the hot sun, their bodies naked and entwined.
She talked to him of things she'd never told him about before. About her life with her mother and father in the house at Cadgwith Cove. About the gray, unhappy years at Peyton Hall. About the day they'd taken Madeline from her when the
Indispensable
was being readied for sail.
"I remember there was this one woman on the ship," she told him as she lay curled in the protective circle of his arm, her head on his shoulder. "She was one of the last ones boarded, and when they brought her down to the docks, she still had her two children with her. One of them was a boy of maybe six, the other a girl of no more than two."